Stop all the Bloomberg feeds, cut off all the cell phones, prevent the press from thinking with a juicy story about the failed politician’s marriage. Because the new governor of the Bank of England, the extremely well-compensated Mark Carney, has just discovered how to fix Great Britain’s economic woes. Can you guess what it is yet? Yes, you might be ahead of me on this one, but he’s going to ‘rescue’ Britain’s economy by printing more money. Who would have thunk it?
(If you can get through the Financial Times paywall, you can read about this here.)
It seems Mr Carney is going to be granted a Federal-Reserve-style mandate of ‘targeting’ both unemployment and price inflation, as opposed to just price inflation. However, since the Bank of England has failed to hit their price inflation target for quite a number of years now, who was counting anyway? This Keynesian dual-targeting of both unemployment and inflation is hilariously based on the 1958 Phillips Curve, which never really worked as a model even back in 1958 and which was repeatedly smashed on the Procrustean rocks of stagflation in the 1970s, to the point where teenage boys would laugh at economics professors who tried to teach it in the ivy league halls of the United States.
However, Keynesians never let history, lost decades, or indeed logic and the unchanging nature of the human condition, ever get in the way of a good mathematical curve, especially when completely unrelated to reality and where it can be used to justify million dollar salaries for themselves personally (once again proving the unchanging nature of the human condition).
And so, after five years of quibbling with a mere half a trillion dollars of quantitative easing, the Bank of England has finally decided to really ‘rescue’ Great Britain, just as Mr Ben Bernanke has ‘rescued‘ the United States, Mr Shinzo Abe has decided to ‘rescue‘ Japan, and Mr Mario Draghi has decided to ‘rescue‘ Euroland. It seems remarkable that they’ve all hit upon the same solution, which is to print more money. Who knew it was that easy?
So why has the Bank of England waited so long outside the western central banking party before deciding to ‘rescue’ Great Britain by flooding it with quadrillions of paper currency units? Before they drown us in yet more digital scrip, however, perhaps they ought to speak first to Mr Gideon Gono, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. I’m confident he has an opinion on this crucial central banking tool.
Maybe they decided against this because money printing is the only central banking tool, and if they’re to be denied this wonder drug, they may as well just all sack themselves? Though it does seem amazing to me that you have to pay a man a million dollars a year to tell you that he’s going to swing the only golf club available in the bag. However, I suppose if he wears a suit nicely, sounds vaguely foreign, and looks ‘authoritative’ on financial news programmes, it’s cheaper than hiring Brad Pitt. We must also remember that although money printing has never done any general society any good, it has done one group of really special people lots of good, especially over the last few years, when most of them should have been made bankrupt. These people are of course the closet friends and the shadowy shareholders of the western central banks, the über-wealthy bank-rollers of the western political classes.
For they just love money printing, especially when it is used to bail out the banks they own and operate. And they’re still über wealthy as a result, when many of them should be pushing trolleys around supermarket car parks. Though collecting supermarket trolleys is honest work, and honest work is something the über-wealthy long since gave up on. Why work when printed money can steal the production of others? Just make sure that you control the people who do the printing. You can ask any mafia gang controlling a high-quality basement counterfeiter about that. And if the money you’re printing is such high quality that it is the currency of the realm, then you can laugh all the way to the Bank of England. So long as you possess the collective morals of a cackle of hyenas.
This article was previously published at TheEuroVigilante.com.
not that I disagree with your sentiments, Andy, but unnecessary and sweeping statements like
“Keynsians never let history…”
and
“money printing has never gone any general society any good”
belong in a propaganda rag, and not in a highbrow blog, such as cobden centre aspires to be!
@Matthew Slater
Can you tell us of any time that money printing has done society in general any good? Or does money printing only ever help certain factions of society at the expense of others?
[“unnecessary and sweeping comments like] “money printing has never gone any general society any good” belong in a propaganda rag
The author is correct. Money-printing has never done any general society any good. Yes, at the beginning, it often appears to create prosperity [GDP is up! Yay!]. But that doesn’t last and the crash always follows.
Harsh truth is not propaganda.
I like the lamp.
And I stronly suspect it will still be valued long after the “Pound”, “Dollar”, “Euro” (and all other fiat currencies) are long gone.
What is worse about this is, last time I watched the BBC select committee, you could see politicians chomping at the bit, as though this was magically going to save the economy. Of course Carney was slicker in his language, by using ‘targeting nominal GDP’ as opposed to ‘I’m going to do exactly the same, and debauch the currency’. He also intends, I believe to now, to transfer us to polymer based bank notes, I suspect this is to reflect the true value of money.
Real inflation in the US and UK is closer to maybe 8-9% when you don’t use their cherry picked data. All this does is inflate the assets of the wealthy, destroys the poor, and crushes the middle class. Britons are about to get a downgrade in living standard, that is going to be noticeable at some point, and that’s when you start to get civil unrest. At least now Sir Meryn is leaving us, he is starting to say some sensible things, albeit not accepting any responsibility for any of this.
The Economist actually supports this policy, its gone gone hill in recent years.
And now the social debasement is clear for all to see. The 99% blame the 1%; the 1% blame the 47%; the private sector blames the public sector, the public sector returns the sentiment – the young blame the old, everyone blame the rich – yet few question the ideas behind government or central banks…
Unfortunately, the intellect and knowledge of the general public has been ‘debt & press morphined’ for decades. ‘Talking into their listening’ with sound bites and sensationalism – hardly what Andy Duncan has done above – is actually letting you see down to the root of the problem, unlike the mainstream, whose entire game is to prevent us seeing the root cause. The internet is redressing this balance and it is our job to tell everyone we know – if we don’t the mainstream will tell it their way.
In Atlas Shrugged Vol 2 chapter 6 – Miracle Metal. Dr Ferris demonstrates precisely the kind of educators we are dealing with, paid for by taxes – all predicted in 1957 – a fictional novel rapidly becoming reality. I was particularly alarmed by the comment ‘This is the age of love we are looking after the general welfare’ as he steals and enslaves – Within 10 years we had the ‘summer of love’ – it makes you realise who sponsored the whole hippy counter culture, whilst dismissing it in public. I am starting to doubt the Beatles!
Good article. The tone is spot on.